Mark Beaumont's new releases review

Kyte, Two Sparks, Two Stars EP (Kids)

People have been taking some disgraceful liberties with Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill of late. Really, there aren't enough skewers in Hell to properly punish Erasure for treating this immaculate Aphrodite of a song like a common Europop whore a few years back. So as Gabriel's cultural kudos hits a peak - namechecked by Vampire Weekend, collaborating with Hot Chip - it's hats off to Leicestershire nu-gazers Kyte for showing it the chivalry it deserves. They buy it dinner, light some candles, wrap it in Cantonese cotton-wool xylophones, seduce it with dreamy sleep-beats and nibble its neck to an amorphous climax. Elsewhere the EP sizzles with cloudtronic grandeur, but Solsbury Hill is its startlingly tender pop beguilement.

Status Quo, It's Christmas Time (UMTV)

Good to see Oasis finally turning into the festive hit-peddlers they were always ... oh, sorry, wrong end of the pile. Here, like asthmatic, one-legged marathon pacemakers, the Quo get their Christmas No 354 hopeful in ahead of the big hitters (X Factor, Wombats, Credit Crunch bloke), leathering on the sleighbells, mistletoe references and crunching 70s riffs in the hope of being mistaken for a Darkness reunion. The result sounds like the Time Team unearthed it from beneath a mountain of rotting denim in the costume cupboard of the Top Of The Pops 1974 Xmas special.

Oasis, I'm Outta Time (Big Brother)

Good to see Oasis capturing the mood of the banking community this festive season and making their Christmas single as cheerful as Hitler's bunker. Plodding all the way to the bank with another chip off the Wonderwall, this is tunefully morose fare that blatantly borrows the piano from the Beatles' A Day In The Life, which I believe is the only crime that still carries the death penalty in this country.

Slipknot, Dead Memories (Roadrunner)

Forget the Texas Chainsaw schtick, the scariest thing about Slipknot is that a band who so resemble a walking Saw trap break into proper singing choruses that wouldn't terrify a Fightstar fan. And now they're projectile vomiting at the mainstream because - get this! - Dead Memories has no grunting on it. At all. Not a gargle. And it's not about mucus or maggots, it's about girls. Shoot the rabid orangutan that seems to be drumming and it'd be Nickelback. Serial killing Satanists rarely come so anodyne.

Credit crunch? Pre-Christmas desperation sales? Global economic downturn? Pah! Get into grime! They're bathing in Benjamins according to Wiley's magnificently cavalier wad-waver Cash In My Pocket. And it can't help but buy him his 15th Tower Hamlets penthouse since it combines his own ferocious beat barrage with the ultimate nu-Motown chorus - Mark Ronson's trademark Tamla tampering and R&B newcomer Daniel Merriweather coming on so Smokey Robinson he could make Krusty weep. Which is a bit like giving away a free Wii with your Windows.